National Polls Give Trump Mixed Reviews

(CN) – Two recent national polls hold mixed news for President Donald Trump, with one revealing that voters expect a favorable outcome in the ongoing Russia scandal while the other showed high numbers of voters saying he is not fit to serve as president.

About 48 percent of voters say it is somewhat or very likely that Trump will be exonerated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in 2018, according to Politico/Morning Consult’s first poll of the new year. Only 37 percent of those polled say they considered it somewhat or highly unlikely he will be cleared.

Meanwhile, Quinnipiac University’s first poll of 2018 bears mostly bad news for Trump, with 57 percent of those polled saying he is not fit to be president. His approval rating continues to hover in the mid-30s percent range.

“It’s been a very tough freshman year for President Donald Trump, by any measure,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll, in his analysis of the results.

Unsurprisingly, the poll’s results hew closely to party lines.

Ninety-one percent of Democrats said Trump is not fit to serve, while 89 percent of Republicans said he is.

In perhaps a more troubling trend for Trump and the GOP, 58 percent of Independents agreed with Democrats that Trump is unqualified, according to the Quinnipiac poll.

The poll carried more bad news for Trump. Thirty-nine percent of voters – the highest percentage of those polled – gave him an F for his first year in office. Only 16 percent handed out an A to the President for the past year.

Furthermore, 63 percent of those polled said Trump is not honest, compared to 34 percent who said he is.

In good news for the president, nearly two-thirds of those polled say the nation’s economy is either good or excellent. This is the highest number to respond this way in the history of the Quinnipiac poll, which began in 2001.

However, nearly half the voters – 49 percent – credited former President Barack Obama for the current condition of the economy.

“President Trump can hang his hat on the economy, but must share the hat rack with President Barack Obama,” Malloy said.

In an early morning tweet on Wednesday, Trump called the Russian probe “the single greatest witch hunt in American history.”

He has repeatedly asserted there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government to swing the election. Many believe the Russians were behind a hack of the Democratic National Convention’s servers during the 2016 presidential race.

Some members of the campaign, including Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos, have already been indicted for money laundering and lying to the FBI, respectively.

Still, the majority of Republicans believe the indictments will not reach Trump after Mueller’s investigation concludes, according to the Politico/Morning Consult poll.

“Three in four Republicans, 74 percent, say it’s likely Trump will be cleared of wrongdoing in the Russia probe this year,” Kyle Dropp, Morning Consult’s co-founder and chief research officer, said in a Politico article on Wednesday. “But only 32 percent of Democrats say the same.”

About 41 percent of poll participants said a member of Trump’s family will be ensnared by the ongoing investigation.

Only 32 percent of those polled by Morning Consult said Trump will leave office in 2018, with 51 percent of Democrats saying they believe it will happen.

Despite the largely positive poll numbers on the Russia issue, the same poll showed that nearly half of all voters believe Democrats will win both the senate and the house in 2018, while just over one-third believe Republicans will retain power in Congress.

The Quinnipiac poll surveyed 1,106 voters nationwide, while the Politico/Morning Consult poll included nearly twice that at 1,988 registered voters.